The Snake
The Snake is a venomous and poisonous rattlesnake. Background The poisonous snake was resting on the path leading up into the Great Mountains to the east of the Sovereignty of Serenia. It is quite a dangerous 'poisonous snake' as Cedric is sure to point out. The snake considered the path leading up into the mountains to be its own, and refused to budge. It warned anyone who attempted to pass it, telling them to stay away. The snake is afraid of rattlesnakes and has such poor eyesight that he can easily be fooled by a man making the right noise.TOBOKQ, 157 Graham, used a tambourine to scare the snake off, so that he could reach the mountains. Titles and nicknames *The Snake *Poisonous Snake Behind the scenes The KQ5 Hintbook, lists this character as the 'POISONOUS SNAKE'/'poisonous snake'. In KQ5 it is often known as the 'poisonous snake' or 'venomous snake', and 'The Snake' in the credits. *A common misconception is that Cedric words are often misspelled or written partially in caps to indicate stress, such as the erroneously spelled, "A POIsonous snake!" in the script. In fact according to the script, he just says, "a poisonous snake!" (as mentioned in the KQ5 Hintbook as well). *Incidentally, Cedric pronounces the word "poisonous" with stress on the first syllable in the CD-rom version. However, writing out "POI" is not a proper way to designate accent stress on a word, one proper linguistic method is to use acute accent (´) or apostrophe (’) indicating the stress: ’poisonous or possibly even póisonous (the latter even indicates a longer vowel sound which Cedric seems to stress). But these markings are generally only shown for linguistic descriptions rather than actual usage within text. While it is treated more or less as a mindless animal in the original version of KQ5, its a verified voiced character in the CD version of the game. In the floppy version, there is a warning if you try to touch the snake In the CD-Rom version the snake talks and there is a close-up graphic of the snake, if you attempt to "touch the snake" using the hand icon. In the NES version the snake is a cobra rather than a rattlesnake (it uses the same graphic used for the Mordack duel at the end of the game). The snake was added to the game to prevent players from going into the mountains and getting stuck before having all the needed items (in this case all the events needed to unlock the tambourine).The Official Book of King's Quest (Second Edition), pg To avoid the pedantic internet discussion of 'venemous vs. poisonous' too much. The narrator calls it a venemous snake, and Cedric calls it poisonous. In modern usage of the terms these are used as forms of how the toxin is administered. Poisonous referring to touching or ingestion, while venemous refers to injection, Some argue that that venom is a subset of poisons, and so poisonous is technically true, while others argue that makes poison too broad, and that having more specific meanings is more useful. This is seemingly a more modern phenomena however in the 2000s or so, as many nature and even some 'science' books from the 1980s used 'poisonous', and 'poisonous' also appears in poetic or literary usages even by William Shakespeare. :Thanks for that. The adult snake lies in the ditch. The young snake that escaped will in time become poisonous and threatening, but for now he has no fangs. Get out of here. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.-Macbeth Quote The Snake: "Ssstay Away! Thisss isss my path!" Narrator: "That wasn't wise, Graham. He who speaks with forked tongue should never be trusted." References Category:Snakes Category:Characters (KQ5CD) Category:Animals (KQ5)